{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":172,"pdf_page":188,"physical_index":188,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6bdf0175f2877203df67a8d3f56b77405ac1996d89a7de00c8d0e88e4ce2815c"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"40. Programs, Subjects, and Zombie Jurisdictions\n\nBut first, I turn back to how the City layer and its platform apparatuses can generate accidents of sovereign subjectivization and how platform megastructures at this layer do and do not work to envelop stable Cloud polities. Well before smart cities evangelism, the modernist call for a more intense technologization of design ’ s disciplinary doxa, blending urban and cybernetic programs, was a predominant discourse. <sup>6</sup> For a century now, it has asked us, in one way or another, to recognize the network city as a shared nervous system, connecting each of us on its terms. Today, however, mastery and transparency are not the only values in play. The accelerated rupture of computational forces up from the Cloud through urban orifices, out into the open view, relies not only on formal piloting of a User along his course, but also on her capacity to proprioceptively map her own displacement in real and imagined geographies. <sup>37</sup> That self-directed — if also still tethered — drift is not antithetical to control and its spatial governance of unwalled User subjects, but at the same time, the legal neutrality with which its ambient interfacial infrastructures address those subjects can result in unexpected, and even disruptive, new demands for access and recognition by those Users. As envelopes compose the urban landscape, the work they do aggregates into regular networks of open and closed centers, pathways and clusters, which in turn combine to give form to territories and larger geographies, but as often as not, the territories produced make conflicting claims on the same User. The generative accident of the mobile apparatus, within the City layer, is the spawning of unintentional sovereign positions into which Users can step, even if they are at odds with formal scripts of jurisdiction.\n\nFor example, in the specific case of the elongated wedge envelope-interface of the US-Mexico international border, its geopolitical disciplinary intrigue spins out as many exceptions to its control assignment as it manages to enforce. As a jurisdictional membrane, many parts of this border are less like the tightly packed machine of a customs zones in an international airport, coding every centimeter with the neutralizing authority of the legal grid, than a wide liminal expanse where the legal transition and translation from one national status to another is vexed, intangible, and dangerously ambiguous, even as the resolute bluntness of the wedge tries in vain to remain unperturbed by that ambiguity. An exemplary fundamentalist reinscription of Westphalian geography, this border tries to cohere and filter control over production and consumption chains between North and South into a single horizontal line. It encapsulates a specifically programmed regime of differential mobility, in which some things are heavily sponsored flows (goods and services) and other things (human bodies) are heavily restricted, the latter then driving the gray and black economies that sprout in the border ’ s cracks. The border is an architecture of both systemic wealth centralization and provincial immiseration. Its geography writes both integration and severance, from the disembedding of local and regional economies to maquiladoros (globally owned factories along the border) and formal kleptocracies, to a cannibalistic drug war feeding the chemically induced mania of American cocaine users (where a neurochemical event inside the head of one person in Los Angeles results indirectly in the decapitation of another person in Tijuana), all operating under the sign of modulated flow: flow of capital, flow of risk, flow of commodities, flow of drugs, flow of serotonin, flow of trucks, flow of tourists, flow of cash, flow of vegetables, flow of electronics, flow of chemical waste products. <sup>38</sup> Along the border zone, where everyday emergency is unexceptional, the rule of law is either comically overenforced or tragically under enforced, both outcomes ensured by a principle of flow along paths of least resistance. As a case study in how the architectural envelope and the virtual envelope can work at productive cross-purposes, it is worth considering in some detail one design project that toys with the paradoxical transformations of the User-migrant-subject status as she moves across this particular jurisdictional melange. <sup>39</sup> Some colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, B.A.N.G. Lab, directed by Ricardo Dominguez, earned the vitriol of local nativists by developing an App called Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBIT), which, when installed on cheap and recycled handsets with GPS, is designed to aid those traveling by foot across the treacherous Sonoran and Mojave deserts from Mexico in the United States (or perhaps the other way around) by directing them to nearby water stations set up by other Samaritan organizations. <sup>40</sup> The migrant humans against which the border wedge defends jurisdictional order can get stranded in a dry sea of sun and sand, neither here nor there. But as far as the device apparatus is concerned, their presence there and their use of the Interface is neither legal nor illegal; they are just a User, and that ’ s good enough to provide full infrastructural and territorial access.\n\n172\n\nCity Layer","previous_page":171,"next_page":173}